Fourier Series and Its Applications

Dr. Md. Kamrujjaman

Department of Mathematics
University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

Syllabus: Fourier series: periodic function; Fourier series process of determining the Fourier
coefficients; Dirichlet conditions; odd and even functions; half range Fourier sine or cosine series;
Parseval’s identity; differentiation and integration of Fourier series.

Why Fourier Series? In calculus you saw that a sufficiently differentiable function f
could often be expanded in a Taylor series, which essentially is an infinite series
consisting of powers of x. The principal concept examined in this study also involves
expanding a function in an infinite series. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician
Joseph Fourier (1768–1830) advanced the idea of expanding a function f in a series of
trigonometric functions. It turns out that Fourier series are just special cases of a more
general type of series representation of a function using an infinite set of orthogonal
functions.
Application of Fourier Series: The Fourier transform has many applications, in fact
any field of physical science that uses sinusoidal signals, such as engineering, physics,
applied mathematics, and chemistry, will make use of Fourier
series and Fourier transforms.
Fourier methods are definitely a widely applied tool of analysis. They are used in
• ALL areas (probably) of signal (i.e. audio, images, radar, sonar, x-ray
crystallography, etc.) processing.
• They are used in many computational algorithms that require convolutions
(see Fast Fourier transform) that have nothing to do with signals.
• They are used in numerical solutions of ordinary and partial differential equations
which can be used to model almost anything (see Spectral method).
• Suffice it to say that the ideas themselves are worth learning just because they are
REALLY neat. But unlike many areas of mathematics, once you learn the ideas
behind Fourier series, you can spend a lifetime inventing new applications.
Fourier invented his series for a real life application, finding solutions of the heat
equation.
• These solutions have had a lot of applications in engineering.
• Another early use was in modelling and predicting ocean tides.
• Fourier series apply to periodic functions, and a generalisation is the Fourier
transform for general functions.
• You use the discrete Fourier transform every time you use wifi.
• A Fourier transform will take a waveform that appears to be chaotic and
reduces it to a summation of frequency components. This is quite valuable if
your looking for a condition to change. you can monitor the frequency
distribution for changes in Fourier magnitude coefficients.
 • WiFi modulation uses orthogonal combinations of amplitude and phase to
encode every bit in a stream, and even makes room for redundant data to
counter the loss due to fading, reflections, multi-path, etc. All this is
synthesised in a DSP engine using FFT and IFFT.
• Without Fourier, we could only encode data like old FM radios, and we’d have
to wait 1 minute to load this page, or leave the laptop all night downloading a
single Tube video.
• Telephones use an ridiculous number of DSP tricks to keep an acceptable voice
quality, including deconvolution, noise reduction, compression, echo
cancellation, equalization, etc. All this done by codec DSPS or FPGA that
calculate Fourier millions of Fourier coefficients per second.
• If Fourier wasn’t used, phone calls would sound like pre-WW2 radios or even
worse: people would have to talk louder the farther away they called from,
calls would be interrupted by noise every time people walked behind a tree or
around cars because of reflections.
• All of Internet uses Spatial-domain Fourier transforms to handle pictures and
videos. All Photoshop tricks and video morphing are based on Fourier
transforms.

Orthogonal Functions and Sets:

Fourier Series-12.2:

Show that the set of trigonometric functions

as in the general discussion of orthogonal series expansions.

Recall Example-1 and we have
Home Work: Find the Fourier series of the function f on the given interval. Give
the number to which the Fourier series converges at a point of discontinuity of f.
Home Work:
and using (22), we find that
Fourier series and Partial Differential Equations: Heat Equation
Note: Heat equation with no-flux boundary conditions:
Example with Neumann boundary conditions:

!!End!!